


The Weight of Living

by blackkat



Series: Tumblr Drabbles [63]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Depression, Friendship, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 02:40:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12224073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackkat/pseuds/blackkat
Summary: No one is going to come up the walk, and Sakumo won't go out.The whispers have gotten worse, lately.





	The Weight of Living

**Author's Note:**

> For a prompt on my Tumblr that I twisted around to make work a little better with my take on Obito as a character, but that pretty much asked for Obito noticing Sakumo was suicidal.

The house is silent and empty, with no one coming. Sakumo already knows that, knows his walkway will stay empty, that there's no chance anyone will turn off the main road and stroll up to his little house. It hurts, because Sakumo has always been a social creature, out more often than he’s in. Everyone in the village knows his name and he likes it that way, because Konoha is _home_ and that’s what home should feel like.

Or, it was.

No one is going to come up the walk, and Sakumo won't go out. The whispers have gotten worse, lately. He keeps failing simple missions, making mistakes that endanger his comrades. He hasn’t actually succeeded at any mission in months. Not since the Suna mission.

Not since the war started.

He _aches_ every time he sees the faces of his fellow shinobi, dressed for battle. Every time he sees the squads of shinobi about to go out, with grim faces and weapons brightly polished. It’s not all-out war quite yet, but there are Suna nin amassing at the border, and whispers that Iwa is gathering forces.

 _I did this_ , he thinks, when former friends turn away from him on the street. _I did this, I did this, I did this_.

His name is disgraced. _He_ is a disgrace, the man who failed a vital mission for the sake of his comrades and then kept on failing.

Sakumo doesn’t know what to do. Everything hurts, and everything is empty, and sometimes he looks at Kakashi and just—

 _Feels_. Feels far too much to ever put into words. Far too much to bear, really, after the bleak, draining fog that the rest of the world has become.

He sits against the wall, under the window, with his head in his hands, and waits for it to be time to go pick up Kakashi. That’s about the only moment he can force himself out of the house, and—

There's a knock on the door.

Startled, Sakumo picks his head up. He didn’t hear feet approaching, but he’s been getting lost in his thoughts too often lately. It’s not inconceivable that someone managed to get to the door with him noticing.

It hurts when he pushes to his feet, bones creaking, and he swallows a groan. Not old yet, but he’s felt it more these last few months than ever before, and he just wants it to _stop_. His feet still move, though, a slow shuffle across the floor, and all he’s ever been is a shinobi—all he’s ever _wanted_ to be is a shinobi—but if his body takes that from him, if he loses that too—

He swallows hard, rearranges his face into his best approximation of a smile, and pulls the door open.

It’s a boy. A boy he’s seen speaking to Kakashi outside the Academy before, with wide dark eyes and messy black hair, a pair of orange goggles pushed up on his forehead. He looks the next best thing to terrified, but when blinks down at him he raises his chin like he’s waiting for a punch.

“Are you Kakashi’s dad?” he asks, like it’s a challenge.

It’s…not what he was expecting. An infinitely more pleasant name than any of the ones he’s normally called, at least, and likely the only one in the world he doesn’t mind answering to.

“I am,” he confirms, and then pauses, the oddity striking him, that this boy is here, now, in the middle of the day. Alarm bolts through his chest, and he grips the edge of the door, breath suddenly not quite enough to fill his lungs. “Is Kakashi all right? Is something wrong? What happened?”

The boy blinks, quick and startled, and rocks back like he’s going to take a step away. “Kakashi’s fine,” he says, suddenly uncertain, and glances back the way he came.

Slowly, slowly, the panic eases, sliding down to coil in Sakumo's gut, and he forces himself to swallow, to relax. “Thank goodness,” he manages, around a smile that doesn’t fit right on his face. “I—would you like to come in?”

Maybe it’s not the right thing to do, but he has no idea why the boy is here, or what he could possibly want. The boy just nods determinedly, steeling himself, and when Sakumo steps out of the way and pulls the door open he trips in, almost falling as he hurries to take off his shoes.

“Shouldn’t you be at the Academy?” Sakumo asks curiously, watching him, and he catches the flush that spreads over the boy’s face, ashamed but defiant as he looks up.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s not like my grades can get _worse_ by skipping a day.”

The Uchiha crest is emblazoned on the back of his jacket, and Sakumo frowns a little, trying to juxtapose an Uchiha child and grades that poor. Usually the clan steps in to keep its reputation up, in cases where a child is struggling.

“Well,” Sakumo says slowly, and wonders if the correct thing to do is march him right back to the Academy. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

The Uchiha boy hesitates, then squares his shoulders and looks up. A moment of wrestling with words and he bursts out, “Are you okay?!”

Sakumo blinks and takes a step back. “What?” he asks, bewildered.

The boy swallows, but doesn’t waver. “You keep getting sadder,” he says. “Every time you come get Kakashi. You look sad and grey and—and you're making Kakashi sad too!”

Sakumo almost feels dizzy. Is he making Kakashi sad? He—he hasn’t noticed. Kakashi acts normally when Sakumo speaks to him, and he’d just—assumed. Thought he was fine. But—

“Are _you_ okay?” the boy asks, watching him closely. Like he _cares_ , when Sakumo is nothing but a disgrace, a _failure_. Reaching out, he touches Sakumo's hand, and says with a child’s certain sincerity, “You look _really sad_ , and it’s not getting better.”

“No,” Sakumo agrees hoarsely, “it’s not.” It’s like there's a black pit inside of him that he’s only just noticing, opening up to swallow him whole. He feels his knees buckle, giving way, and stumbles back against the wall, sliding down it to the floor. There's a sound of alarm, and a moment later the child drops to his knees next to Sakumo, reaching out like he wants to touch but isn’t sure it will be welcome.

“People talk about you,” he says, and Sakumo can't help the low, wounded noise that tears from his throat. He drops his head to his knees, twisting his fingers into his hair so he doesn’t have to look at the Uchiha boy, see the derision on his face when he asks why Sakumo is like this now when he used to be one of the best.

A pause, and then the boy says, in a wavering voice, “People talk about you like the Uchiha talk about me.”

Sakumo goes still. What? He raises his head enough to meet dark eyes, still full of fear but also a burning sort of conviction, and the boy holds his gaze without wavering.

“Who—” Sakumo starts, but has to swallow when the word cracks in his mouth. “Who are you?”

“Uchiha Obito!” the boy says, and the introduction is defiant, like he’s daring someone to tell him he can't carry his clan name. Sakumo thinks he understands exactly how that feels. He’s hardly been able to look at the family shrine himself these past months, for fear some ghost will be waiting, ready to strip him of his name.

“Hatake Sakumo,” he returns, and it’s not nearly as bold as Obito's introduction. Can't be, when it sits heavy in his chest and hurts his throat. “You—your parents are going to worry, Obito. Shouldn’t you be…” He trails off, because Obito is wincing, looking away for a moment before he looks back.

“I don’t have any parents,” he says. “And—and I thought. I thought Kakashi was really lucky, but you’re both making each other sad, and…”

“I didn’t mean to,” Sakumo says, and bows his head to his knees. And then, disbelievingly, “I didn’t even _notice_.” It hurts, and he hates it, but—

Maybe he can do better. Maybe he can fix this, at the very least.

With a quiet thump, Obito sits on the floor next to him, back to the wall and legs crossed under him. “You can't notice everything,” he says. “It happens.”

It feels a little like forgiveness. Sakumo takes a breath that shakes, but Obito doesn’t say anything more. Just sits with him, in the silence of the house, quiet but not noiseless.

Sakumo listens to the sound of him breathing, matches it. Feels his heart keep going, one slow, steady beat at a time. He’s not alone, and somehow, that makes the entire grey weight of the world just a little bit easier to bear.


End file.
